See also: How to use VirtualBox in Multipass on macOS, How to use a different terminal on macOS
Contents:
Check prerequisites
The default backend on macOS is qemu
, wrapping Apple’s Hypervisor.framework. You can use any Mac (M1, M2, or Intel based) with macOS 10.15 Catalina or later installed.
Install, upgrade, uninstall
To install Multipass on macOS, you have two options: the installer package or brew
. Upgrading and uninstallation options depend on this choice as well.
Using the installer package
Download the latest installer from here. You can also get pre-release versions from our GitHub releases page - it’s the .pkg
package.
If you want Tab completion on the command line, install bash-completion@2
from brew
and follow these instructions on updating your .bashrc
file.
Activate the downloaded installer and it will guide you through the necessary steps. You will need an account with administrator privileges to complete the installation.
To uninstall, run the script:
$ sudo sh "/Library/Application Support/com.canonical.multipass/uninstall.sh"
Using brew
If you don’t have it already, install Brew. Then, to install Multipass simply execute:
$ brew install multipass
To uninstall while keeping your VMs and data, you can use:
$ brew uninstall multipass
Caveats:
Although Brew supports the --zap
option to remove all data, it does not allow Multipass to remove all the VMs and data properly. The Multipass daemon needs to be alive and running to unregister VMs from certain backends (e.g. VirtualBox). However, Brew executes the zap procedure strictly after the uninstall step. By then, the Multipass daemon is no longer available.
This issue report has more information. The workaround is to remove VMs manually before uninstalling:
multipass delete --purge --all
brew uninstall --zap multipass # to destroy all other data, too
Run
You’ve installed Multipass. Time to run your first commands! Use multipass version
to check your version or multipass launch
to create your first instance.